‘Take this very seriously’: Florida warned over Hurricane Ian as fuel and food stockpiled
Residents and holidaymakers in Florida have been warned not to be complacent, as storm-in-a-century Hurricane Ian’s 140mph winds are expected to affect the whole state.
After making landfall in Cuba as a powerful Category 3 storm, it is now feared it will be upgraded to Category 4 as it intensifies while crossing the Gulf’s warm waters and barrels towards Florida.
At an emergency briefing at the White House on Tuesday, Deanne Criswell, spokeswoman for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), said: “The storm surge is going to be significant, and you put 20 inches of rain on top of that….
“Take this very seriously, do not underestimate the potential this storm can bring.
“We are talking about impacts in parts of Florida that haven’t seen a major direct impact in nearly 100 years.”
Evacuation orders have been issued for more than 300,000 people in Tampa Bay along Florida’s west coast, but the entire state is expected to be impacted to some degree, with 2.5 million evacuated from homes in total.
People in Key West – and wider Florida – have been told to take the warnings seriously and shelter. Pic: AP
Ian is heading towards the Florida Keys, a popular holiday destination, made up of many islands, some less than a mile wide.
Joe Biden, the US president, cancelled a planned trip on Tuesday and called mayors in three Florida cities to assure them federal support is ready to deploy food, fuel and shelter.
A total of 29 emergency shelters have already been set up by Fema personnel sent to the state on Monday.
One of Cuba’s famed vintage cars is stopped in its tracks by Ian
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Hurricane Ian as seen from space
The US National Hurricane Centre said the storm made landfall early on Tuesday in the Cuban province of Pinar del Rio.
Daniel Brown, the centre’s senior specialist, said it came with “extreme hurricane-force winds, also life-threatening storm surge and heavy rainfall”.
Officials there set up 55 shelters, rushed in emergency personnel, and took steps to protect crops in Cuba’s main tobacco-growing region.
Traffic builds along the interstate out of Tampa as people try to escape before the hurricane approaches. Pic: AP
Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, has declared a state of emergency throughout the state and urged residents to prepare.
He warned of “broad impacts throughout the state” and said the weather system brought with it a risk of a “dangerous storm surge, heavy rainfall, flash flooding, strong winds, hazardous sea, and isolated tornadic activity”.
Flooding is predicted for much of the Florida peninsula midweek, and then heavy rainfall is possible for the southeast of the US later this week.
Empty shelves
In some parts of Florida, supermarket shelves have been emptied and many residents have placed sandbags around their homes.
The last time Tampa Bay, expected to be in the eye of Ian, was hit by a major storm was 25 October 1921.
The National Hurricane Centre is predicting storm surge in Tampa Bay and surrounding waters of between 5ft and 10ft (1.5m and 3m) above normal tide conditions because of Hurricane Ian.
Pic: AP
“That’s a lot of rain. That’s not going to drain out quickly,” Cathie Perkins, emergency management director in Pinellas County, where St Petersburg and Clearwater are, said.
“This is no joke. This is life-threatening storm surge.”
The extreme weather event sparked NASA to shelter its Artemis 1 lunar rocket, the third time it has been postponed.
While BP and Chevron have shut down their offshore oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico due to the expected hurricane.
The British embassy in Washington DC advised Britons to “closely monitor local and international weather updates and follow the advice of local authorities and/or your tour operator, including any evacuation orders”.
It added: “If you’re in Florida, Puerto Rico or the US Virgin Islands and you need urgent help, call +1 305 400 6400. If you’re in the UK and worried about a British person in the USA, call 020 7136 6857 (24/7, 365 days a year).”
Donald Trump has said he wants to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong Un again.
Speaking at the White House as he held talks with the new South Korean president Lee Jae Myung, Mr Trump told reporters: “I’d like to meet him this year… I look forward to meeting with Kim Jong Un in the appropriate future.”
“I’d like to have a meeting. I got along great with him,” President Trump said, adding they “became very friendly” during his first term in office.
“We think we can do something in that regard,” he said, adding that he would like to help the relationship between the two Koreas.
Trump and Kim at the demilitarized zone in June 2019. Pic: Reuters
Mr Trump and Mr Kim held three meetings between 2018 and 2019 during Mr Trump’s first term and exchanged a number of, what the president called, “beautiful” letters.
In June 2019, Mr Trump briefly stepped into North Korea from the demilitarized zone (DMZ) with South Korea.
The US president on Monday responded to a question about whether he would return to the DMZ by fondly recalling the last time he did so.
“Remember when I walked across the line and everyone went crazy?” especially the Secret Service, Mr Trump told reporters in the Oval Office.
But “I loved it”, Mr Trump said. He added he felt safe because he had a good relationship with Mr Kim.
Mr Trump met South Korea’s Lee Jae Myung at the Oval Office on Monday. Pic: Reuters
Mr Trump became the first sitting American president to set foot on North Korean soil six years ago.
However, little progress was made in curbing North Korea’s nuclear programme, and Mr Trump acknowledged in March this year that Pyongyang is a “nuclear power”.
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Since Mr Trump’s first-term meetings with Mr Kim ended, North Korea has shown no interest in returning to talks.
The White House said in June that Mr Trump would welcome communications with Mr Kim.
The attempts at rapprochement come after the election in South Korea of Mr Lee, who has pledged to reopen dialogue with North Korea.
As a gesture of engagement in June, Mr Lee suspended South Korean loudspeakers blasting music and messages into the North at the DMZ along their shared border.
Analysts say, however, that engaging North Korea will likely be more difficult for both Mr Lee and Mr Trump than it was in the president’s first term.
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Since then, North Korea has significantly expanded its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programmes.
And it has developed close ties with Russia through direct support for Moscow’s war in Ukraine, with Pyongyang providing both troops and weaponry.
Mr Kim told Russian President Vladimir Putin that his country will always stand with Moscow, state media reported in June.
US rapper Lil Nas X has pleaded not guilty after being charged with assaulting a police officer while walking in downtown Los Angeles in his underwear.
The musician, real name Montero Lamar Hill, was taken to hospital and arrested after police responded to reports of a naked man shortly before 6am on Thursday.
The district attorney’s office said on Monday that Lil Nas X faces three counts of battery with injury on a police officer and one count of resisting an executive officer.
He was being held on a $75,000 (£55,457) bail, conditional on attending drug treatment. It is not immediately clear whether he had posted it and been released yet.
He is set to return to court on 15 September for his next pre-trial hearing.
Pic: AP
During the hearing on Monday, Hill’s lawyer Christy O’Connor told the judge he had led a “remarkable” life, adding: “Assuming the allegations here are true, this is an absolute aberration in this person’s life.
“Nothing like this has ever happened to him.”
A law enforcement source told Sky’s US partner network, NBC News, on Thursday that the Old Town Road and Industry Baby hitmaker punched an officer twice in the face during the encounter.
The source added officers were unsure whether he was on any substances or in mental distress.
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NBC News cited TMZ footage where Hill was seen walking down the middle of Ventura Boulevard at 4am on Thursday in a pair of white briefs and cowboy boots.
In the videos, Hill tells a driver to “come to the party” in one clip and in another tells the person: “Didn’t I tell you to put the phone down?”
“Uh oh, someone’s going to have to pay for that,” Hill says as he continues to walk away.
In some clips, Hill struts as if he’s on a catwalk, posing for onlookers, and at one point he places an orange traffic cone on his head.
A man who was wrongly deported from the US to El Salvador has been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) again.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a 30-year-old originally from El Salvador, handed himself into the ICE field office in Baltimore, Maryland, for a check-in on Monday.
The visit was a mandatory condition of his release from federal custody earlier this weekend. However, in a court filing on Saturday, his lawyers said they expected Garcia would be detained again upon attending.
Garcia is charged in an indictment, filed in federal court in Tennessee, with conspiring to transport illegal immigrants into the US.
An emotional Kilmar Abrego Garcia appears outside the ICE Baltimore field office on 25 August 2025. Pic: Reuters
According to a court filing by his lawyers, immigration officials made an offer to Garcia to be deported to Costa Rica in exchange for pleading guilty to the charges.
Otherwise, they would seek to deport him to Uganda.
Pics: Reuters
Speaking at a news conference outside the ICE office on Monday morning, Garcia said via a translator: “This administration has hit us hard, but I want to tell you guys something: God is with us, and God will never leave us.
“God will bring justice to all the injustice we are suffering.”
Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, one of Garcia’s lawyers, also said: “There was no need to take him into ICE detention… the only reason they took him into detention was to punish him.”
A judge later ruled Garcia could not be deported after he filed a challenge asking to be allowed due process to fight any removal attempt.
Judge Paula Xinis ruled the 30-year-old must remain detained in the US until she can hold an evidentiary hearing – set for Wednesday.
She added there appeared to be “several grounds” for her to have jurisdiction to exercise relief, including that Uganda has not agreed to offer Garcia protections, such as being able to walk freely, being given refugee status, and not being re-deported to El Salvador.
After initially being detained in Maryland – where he lived with his American wife and children – by ICE in March, Garcia was sent to El Salvador, where he was then imprisoned in the country’s maximum security Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT).
This was despite an immigration judge’s 2019 order granting him protection from deportation after finding he was likely to be persecuted by local gangs if he was returned to his native country.
Garcia was first detained by ICE in March. Pic: CASA/AP
The Trump administration admitted deporting Garcia was an “administrative error”, but said at the time they could not bring him back as they do not have jurisdiction over El Salvador.
After eventually returning him to the US in June, the Trump administration detained Garcia on criminal charges that were filed in May.
The criminal indictment alleges Garcia worked with at least five co-conspirators to bring immigrants to the US illegally and transport them from the border to other destinations in the country.
Minutes after his release on Friday, officials notified Garcia they intended to deport him to Uganda.
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Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem, US President Donald Trump, vice president JD Vance and other officials claim Garcia was a member of MS-13 – an international criminal gang formed by immigrants who had fled El Salvador‘s civil war to protect Salvadoran immigrants from rival gangs.
Garcia’s lawyers strongly deny the claims.
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